After Mitt Romney decided to go full birther this Friday at a campaign stop in Michigan, it appears CNN's Jim Acosta isn't the only one who needs to be called out for conflating Romney's racist "joke" and President Obama making fun of Romney putting his dog on his roof.

Andrea Mitchell was playing the same game as Acosta in the clip above while discussing Romney's race baiting, which she pretended she didn't know was race baiting. Here's more from Gawker who took Acosta to the woodshed over this: Mitt Romney Reduced to Pointing Out His Whiteness to Voters:

Ha, ha, "Everyone knows I'm a real American, due to my white skin! No one would ever ask to see my papers, because I am white!" [Crowd cheers.]

Theoretically this is too obviously racist to count as a "dog whistle," and yet people seem to not notice that Romney is basically pointing at his skin and winking:

The "dog on roof" stuff is jokes about something that Mitt Romney actually did. The birther stuff is made-up paranoid racist conspiracy theories attacking the very legitimacy of Obama's presidency. They are not the same "stuff."

No they are not.